As of summer 2017, the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL), which is part of the National Science Foundation, had awarded 279 research grants, most of which are exploring aspects of “cyberlearning.”
CIRCL’s October 2017 report on the designs, ideas and progress in the cyberlearning community pulled together the work of 22 authors. Called “Cyberlearning Community Report: The State of Cyberlearning and the Future of Learning with Technology,” it delves into six design themes emerging across NSF-funded cyberlearning projects:
- Community Mapping: Moving and Discovering across Contexts
- Expressive Construction: Enabling Learners to Represent Powerful Ideas
- Classrooms as Digital Performance Spaces
- Virtual Peers and Coaches: Social and Cognitive Support for Learning
- Remote Scientific Labs: Authenticity at Distance
- Enhancing Collaboration and Learning through Touch Screen Interface.
The authors see these as an increased emphasis on context, mobility, physicality, agency, authenticity and social learning. And they see how researchers are adjusting or changing study methods to measure what the shifts mean.
CIRCL offers an additional resource in its primers—an ever-growing selection of brief summaries that address key cyberlearning topics. Check out this Primer on Learning Sciences, written by Jeremy Roschelle (now with Digital Promise) and others to get a better idea of what primers are like.
